The difference is that the picture on the right is really 640 pixels wide and 480 tall! Its file size is a whopping 75Kb; small for a good photograph, but way too large for casual use on a web page. Notice how slow it was to download. We made it fit into a 250 pixel wide space. Now imagine a page with ten pictures like that. You could go paint your toenails, have supper, wash the dishes, and do your homework, before that page would fully load. The left picture is the same photo, resized and compressed with a graphics program. It's slightly fuzzy, and won't enlarge or print on paper very well. But it downloads FAST! That's the trade-off ... a little image quality, for a big increase in speed, and a lot less viewer frustration. By the way, it's a good idea to fill in the 'ALT' tags in the image tag (see the source), so that people can tell what the images are going to be while they wait for them to download. You might also consider using very tiny 'thumbnails' of each picture on your page, with a link on each to a separate page where the full picture will open, if the visitor chooses to open it. That way they won't mind the slow download! |
